THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE KNOXVILLE AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN W. NIPPER

Transcription

1 THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE KNOXVILLE AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN W. NIPPER FOR THE VERTERAN S ORAL HISTORY PROJECT CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WAR AND SOCIETY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY INTERVIEW BY G. KURT PIEHLER AND JIM MORRIS KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE APRIL 6, 2001 TRANSCRIPT BY JIM MORRIS REVIEWED BY BRAD MASON AND CINNAMON BROWN

2 KURT PIEHLER: This begins an interview with John W. Nipper on April 6, 2001 in Knoxville, Tennessee with Kurt Piehler and JIM MORRIS: Jim Morris. PIEHLER: And you were born on September 16, 1924 in Knox County. JOHN W. NIPPER: Yes. PIEHLER: Which part of Knox County were you born in? NIPPER: South Knoxville. PIEHLER: South Knoxville. NIPPER: Yes. PIEHLER: And you still live in South Knoxville. NIPPER: Yes. PIEHLER: And your parents were also they re well your father s a native of Knox County. NIPPER: Correct. PIEHLER: But your mother is from Texas originally? NIPPER: Originally, yes. PIEHLER: How did your parents meet? NIPPER: My grandfather was a Baptist minister, and he went from church to church, you know, in different states. And they moved from Texas I think I don t know exactly where it was, but it was in East Tennessee. And my mother was one of ten children, I believe. And they moved in this area. PIEHLER: And do you know how your parents met? Was it a church social, or was it NIPPER: They went to the same church together. PIEHLER: They did? NIPPER: And I recall that he proposed to my mother in an airplane ride. That was something that I remember their saying. (Laughter) 1

3 PIEHLER: And what kind of airplane ride was it? Was it a regular NIPPER: It was just an open cockpit. PIEHLER: Open cockpit. NIPPER: Uh huh. PIEHLER: So it sounds like it was a joyride. NIPPER: Right, that s what it was, uh huh. I think he had planned that all along. (Laughs) PIEHLER: And you father was a machinist. NIPPER: Yes. At ALCOA, Aluminum Company of America. PIEHLER: How long did he work there? NIPPER: He worked there for nineteen years before his death. PIEHLER: And your mother was a music teacher. NIPPER: Yes, she studied piano when she was in Texas as a teenager, and went through Haun School of Music, I believe it was, and became a piano teacher. PIEHLER: And while you were growing up did she teach the piano? NIPPER: Yes. PIEHLER: She taught in her house or NIPPER: [She] taught in the home and then occasionally she would go to the schools and teach. And also occasionally to the home. MORRIS: Did she teach you how to play the piano? NIPPER: She attempted to teach me. But I didn t I took for about two years, but I don t think that s the best way to learn is to teach from, to learn from your parents. MORRIS: Why is that? NIPPER: I don t think you take it as seriously. Now my mother taught my granddaughter, and she went the classical music route. And she did very good. MORRIS: Did they raise you in the Baptist Church? 2

4 NIPPER: Yes. Yes. MORRIS: And did they talk much about the Baptist faith and have devotionals or anything like that? NIPPER: Yes, we of course my grandfather being a minister, I stayed at his house just about as long as I did at my own home. But we were very close. And, of course, my grandfather would talk to me about, you know, spiritual things, and I became a Christian at eleven years of age in the church where I had attended all my life up to that point. MORRIS: Being Republicans, did they have any influence on your decision to be a Republican? NIPPER: No. No. PIEHLER: I m just curious. You told a great story about your grandfather, which we should really get on tape both how you learned something about him doing a job. And then about his own background and how could you tell that story about him? NIPPER: Yes. My grandfather grew up in Dayton, Tennessee. And he wanted to become a minister. And Carson-Newman College was the closest college that the Baptists operated as a ministerial college. And he walked from Dayton, Tennessee to Carson-Newman College to attend school. And I was in business, and they had called me at Carson-Newman College to come up and look at some work they wanted to have done. And during the conversation, I talked to this man who was in charge of the records and he told me, I told him my grandfather graduated there in the late 1800s. And he said, Let s see if we can find his record. And they had had a fire there that burned up a lot of the pictures. But he found his record, and he graduated from Carson-Newman College in And it gave a little resume of what he did. He worked his way through school there waiting on tables and doing odd jobs around there to help pay his tuition. And that s how I came to know when it was he attended. But there were thirteen in his graduating class. PIEHLER: And it sounds like it was a really fun connection to have made. NIPPER: Oh, yes. Yes. Um hmm, I enjoyed it very much. MORRIS: Did do you remember growing up did your parents ever talk about Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Did they ever talk anything about him how they felt about him? NIPPER: My father and mother grew up during the Depression. And while we had adequate food and shelter and clothing, there were some struggles. And then when Franklin Roosevelt came along, and introduced the New Deal, or whatever it was that put the economy back on the right road they spoke highly of him. MORRIS: Even though he was a Democrat, and they were Republicans? 3

5 NIPPER: Right, right. I think that they really considered the individual rather than the politics. I don t think that was the main party line was the main thing that they were so staunch about being a Republican or Democrat. MORRIS: You had said earlier that s how you approach it now, right? NIPPER: Yes. MORRIS: did you learn that from them? That kind of approach to politics. NIPPER: I think it just grew. I just listened and made my own, made my own decision. PIEHLER: Growing up, did you have electricity? NIPPER: When I was in grade school, we did not have electricity. We studied by an oil lamp. When I was in about the seventh grade, I believe that we had electricity connected to our house. And it was just a chord extending from the ceiling with a light bulb that s the extent of it. And we had no electric stove, we used [a] wood stove, and it was a primitive way, but we had chores to do, so we never got in too much trouble because of our activities. PIEHLER: Now did you have indoor plumbing? NIPPER: No. PIEHLER: No. NIPPER: No, we did not. PIEHLER: Did you NIPPER: not until I was ready to go in service, I guess, before that we had plumbing. PIEHLER: When you were living in South Knox were you actually living in the city itself at the time. NIPPER: No, it was in the county. PIEHLER: It was in the county. NIPPER: Yes. Uh huh. PIEHLER: Did your parents own their house? NIPPER: Yes. They had borrowed $1500 from my uncle or from my mother s uncle. And they had just finished paying off that money back to her uncle when the Depression really hit. And [of] course they owned the house outright as they were able to pay [him] back that money. 4

6 PIEHLER: So they were very fortunate in some ways in that sense. NIPPER: Yes. PIEHLER: What about your neighbors? What were they like? NIPPER: We had good neighbors. One of our neighbors owned a little grocery store. And you bought the groceries and paid for it, for the groceries, at the end of the week. We had two cows, and we had a garden, and we could survive on that. PIEHLER: How regular was your father s work growing up in the Depression, say, in 32, 33, 34? Do you remember? NIPPER: He was off from work for a good long while, and he got a job working for a dairy, and it was just manual work. He had worked prior to that in a marble company, and the working conditions weren t too good. And they would work long hours and no benefits or anything like that. But then after he was laid off from work for some time I don t recall how long it was, but he applied for a job at ALCOA, and he served an apprentice trade and went on through and became a machinist. And from that time on he was never out of work. PIEHLER: So ALCOA was the steady job. NIPPER: Right. PIEHLER: As opposed to the marble factory NIPPER: Right. PIEHLER: and the dairy. What year did he start? Do you remember what year he started at ALCOA? NIPPER: It was in PIEHLER: Was it during. NIPPER: It was in the 40s. PIEHLER: It was in the 40s, so it was during the war? NIPPER: It was. He worked there during the war, yes. But he had gone to work there prior to PIEHLER: Prior to the war. NIPPER: Yes. 5

7 PIEHLER: But definitely in the late 30s or early 40s at the earliest. NIPPER: Yes. PIEHLER: Had your father served in the military? NIPPER: No. PIEHLER: No. NIPPER: No, he was at that age in between, you know, when World War I PIEHLER: World War I NIPPER: Yeah. MORRIS: What was life like with your brother and sister, and are they still living, by the way? NIPPER: Yes, both my brother and sister are still living. We were a close-knit family. We got along fine. We didn t my brother and I were real close, and [of] course my sister was my mother s favorite, and she was the one that got preferential treatment. (Laughs) But in addition to being my father, my dad was my best buddy. PIEHLER: You were very close to your dad? NIPPER: Yes. We would hunt and fish and do things together. PIEHLER: Oh, you mentioned hunting and fishing with your dad. What else would you do for fun growing up, particularly when you were younger? NIPPER: We would play games at the school. We had we went to Mt. Olive Elementary School. And there was a ball field there that we could play softball or baseball and football and different places in the community where people that let us use a field to play, and. I was always interested in little rubber-powered airplanes, and my brother and I made several of those, and we used to read a lot of the books [on] Orville [and] Wilbur Wright, and aviation was sort of in the back of my mind. MORRIS: What were those planes like? You said they were rubber-powered? NIPPER: Yeah, they were made with little balsa sticks and that had a rubber band that you d wind the propeller. And then you d toss it out, and it would fly, and you know, just for a short while. And then it would land. MORRIS: So your brother was interested in that too? 6

8 NIPPER: Yes. PIEHLER: You would have been very, very young, well, but you don t have any recollection of Lindbergh s flight. NIPPER: I remember quite well my mother and dad talking about it. PIEHLER: That was a big item of conversation. NIPPER: Yeah, it was the headlines in the news. PIEHLER: Did you follow aviation at all growing up as a kid? I mean there were a lot of famous aviators out there when you were in the 30s. Did you NIPPER: I read a lot of articles on aviation and the different ones that tried to learn how to fly without a plane, you know, mechanically. And I recall one time that we were going to try to learn to fly on our own. And we made this contraption, and I jumped off of a building and came very near (Laughs) meeting my maker. PIEHLER: Or being very seriously injured. (Laughs) NIPPER: Right, right. (Laughter) PIEHLER: How often would you go out to the airport? Was that a destination you would choose? NIPPER: We went to, on Sutherland Avenue where that high school is now I think it s a public housing project that was an airport. PIEHLER: People have told me that NIPPER: and they brought that Ford tri-motored plane out there, and I recall going out there and seeing that plane fly. That was on a Sunday afternoon right down in the Bearden section there, and I recall there was a man doing some tricks on a motorcycle, and he would ride down that runway on a motorcycle standing up on the seat, and that stuck in my mind as a PIEHLER: How old were you? Do you know? NIPPER: I was still a teenager. I don t remember exactly how old I was at that time, but I had not gone to high school. PIEHLER: It sounds like you wanted to be a pilot pretty badly, as a kid, growing up that that was your dream job. 7

9 NIPPER: When I graduated from high school, they put a little note beside your picture. And an airplane pilot is what I said I d like to be. I never dreamed that it would happen the way it did. MORRIS: I know [you] went the high school you went to has changed names a million times and locations. What was it like when you were going to school there? NIPPER: I wasn t the happiest in grade school. We had a principal that was very strict. And he could say things to embarrass you in class. And sometimes he would even make the references if you were dumb that you d never... PIEHLER: Never amount to anything. NIPPER: Right. And they had a lot of whippings and punishment back then. It was, I mean I ve seen him whip a student unmercifully for things that I didn t think he should ve had that kind of punishment. PIEHLER: It sounds like he was brutalizing students, not just NIPPER: Right. Right. PIEHLER: not just harsh discipline, but that things that you might get arrested for today. NIPPER: Right. PIEHLER: Is that a fair? NIPPER: I was afraid of him. PIEHLER: Yeah. NIPPER: But and I struggled in grade school. And I, I thought, I said, Well, I ll never amount to a great deal because I m dumb. But when I got in high school, I made the honor roll almost every, almost every time that we got our grade cards. And I think it was the difference in the teachers. Now I had some good grade school teachers, but this one man was... I shouldn t talk about him that way, but he was unreasonable. I recall this incident if we got in trouble at school, and our parents found out about it, we d be in trouble when we got home. And someone said that my brother said a bad word, and they told this principal about it. And he approached him on it, and he said, No, I did not say a bad word. He said, We don t use that kind of language. He [the principal] said, Well, I was told from [a] reliable source that you said a bad word. And this wasn t too long after the beginning of the school year. And he said, As punishment for that, you cannot go down on the playground, and play with the other children, for the rest of the school year. That was his punishment, and we re talking about six months or longer. Well he abided by what the principal told him. And one day we were talking at the dinner table, and this was a month I guess after that, and something came up in the conversation, and my brother said, Well I can t do that, I can t go down to play with the others. And my dad picked up on that. He said, Why? He said, The principal told me that I said a bad word. He 8

10 said, Well did you say a bad word? He said, No, I did not. He said, Well, he told me that I could not go down and play with the other students for the rest of the entire school year. He said, Well, I trust what you ve told me that you didn t say a bad word, but if you did, that was too harsh a punishment. He said, I ll be back in a little while. And this was nine o clock at night when we normally go to bed. Everybody went to bed when they blew the lamp out. And he went down there and called the principal out and told him what he was down there for. And he said, I usually do not take sides with my son. I believe that the punishment that you ve imposed on him is too great a punishment. And he said, In the morning, I want him down there on the playground. And he said, I didn t come down here to whip you, but, he said, if that boy is not down there on the playground, in the morning, playing with the others, he said, you re going to get the worst whippin you ve ever encountered. And that was all that was said. Well, my brother went down on that ball field the next morning. The principal walked down there and called him to one side, and he said, I want you to come over here. He said, I thought I told you that you couldn t play on this playground for the rest of the school year. And my brother said, But what did my daddy tell you last night? He said, I just want to let you know that it s alright for you to come down and play. (Laughter) And that was the end of it. That s some [of] the little things that stick in your mind, you know, as a young PIEHLER: Well it sounds like your dad really did stick up for you. NIPPER: Yeah he did, uh huh. PIEHLER: In high school what kind of things did you study? What was your craft study? Did you study vocational or college prep, or... NIPPER: As far as I know, we didn t PIEHLER: You didn t have those tracks. NIPPER: I don t think we had that back then, or at least it wasn t called to my attention. PIEHLER: Yeah. NIPPER: I did a little better than average in high school. I took industrial arts courses. I worked on the school paper, I earned a letter by working on the school paper. And we went to all the sport activities. I liked every one of my high school teachers. They were dedicated teachers, especially my English teacher. She was an unmarried lady, but she took that teaching to heart. She was fair and she knew how to teach and how to make you learn. And the principal of high school was my algebra teacher, and he was a good teacher. He used to have some funny remarks. I think he told this to me he may have said it to the whole class, but he said, Sometimes it s better to keep your mouth shut and act dumb, than it is to open it and remove all doubt. (Laughter) PIEHER: You mentioned working for the school newspaper. Did you play any sports? 9

11 NIPPER: No, I was small for football, and I think we had a baseball team. I attended all the sport activities. The basketball and football was primarily, but we went to all the games. But we would play football in the neighborhood, you know, with different ones, but not actively in sports in high school. PIEHLER: Were you involved in any clubs in high school? NIPPER: No, I wasn t. I wasn t a Thespian. My brother was a thespian. I was in a couple of the school plays, but that s about the extent of it. MORRIS: Do you remember the plays that you were in or what part you played? NIPPER: I don t remember that. I know it was and I was a stage manager one time, you know, things like that. I was sort of in the background. I didn t have any leading part or anything like that. MORRIS: What prompted you to get involved in theatre? How did you even come about to audition to get a part or to be a stage manager? NIPPER: Yeah, you auditioned. I just thought, Well, all these other fellas, all these other friends of mine were, uh you know, well there [are] quite a few people in the plays, and so, why don t I just see if I could be selected in one. MORRIS: What got you interested in the newspaper? You said you d done work with the newspaper. NIPPPER: I won the school typing pin (Laughs), for typing, and I could type more words per minute than anybody in my class. And our school paper had to be typed. And so, that s how I got involved. They wanted me to do the typing on the school paper. I didn t write any of the articles or any of the sports events, or anything like that. It was just mostly mechanical work after somebody else had given all the thought and the planning to it. MORRIS: How often did the paper come out, the school paper? NIPPER: It came out about, I guess maybe every two or three weeks, maybe once a month. I don t recall right off hand, but it just gave general information, told of sports events and different awards that people had gotten, or things like that. MORRIS: You were talking about earlier that the grade school experience wasn t good, but that you gained, [it] sounded like you were talking about gaining some confidence in high school. Do you think it was a combination of the teachers, and what do you think that NIPPER: I think the teachers in high school knew how to make you want to learn. Now I had two or three my first grade school teacher, I remember her name was Ms. Harris, and she was a jewel of a lady. She just made you feel like that you were in the best place that you could ever be right now. That you re going to do a good job, and we re going to help you. Then I got 10

12 up to the fifth grade or fourth grade, and back then we had flash cards that they d hold up. And you were either supposed to multiply the number, or you were supposed to add it or divide it or subtract it, and write it down. She would hold em up and I d write down on a piece of paper. Well, we had done that for two weeks, and the lady never took up the papers. So I said, I m wasting my time writing all this down. So, she d flash those cards, and I d act like I was writing. I didn t put a thing down. That day, I think she saw my page (Laughs), she took the papers up, mine was a blank. She bent my hand back, and she took a ruler, and she almost blistered the palm of my hand. (Laughs) But she was a good teacher too, but she, I never did do that anymore. (Laughter) MORRIS: So it was effective, I guess, right? NIPPER: Yeah, it was effective, yeah. MORRIS: Well did you start thinking about college when you were in high school? NIPPER: Yes. My dad being a machinist we had a brother and sister, that s three of us, and he said, You can stay home and work at odd jobs to pay your tuition. He says, On my income, I can t afford to send three children to college. But he said, I ll treat all three of you alike, if I can t send one, I won t send any. But he said, It won t cost you a thing to stay home. And [he] said, You help with the chores around here, and said, You can find enough work, mowing yards and things like that, to pay your tuition. So, that s what we did, and my brother and I and my brother after he got out of high school, he was sixteen months older than I, and he went to work at ALCOA, for a year, to save up money to go to college. So, we both entered college the same year. When I got out of high school well it was before I got out of high school the little store that was the country store near where we lived, they hired me to work in that little store. And then we mowed yards, and they only paid me $2.00 a week, but it was spending money, you know, that I would not have had. And I cleaned houses. My neighbor would pay me to come in on Saturday and clean her house and do ironing and dusting and things like, not ironing, but sweeping and waxing the floors, and all that. And at this little grocery store, there was a man that worked for the TVA, and he took a liking to me. And he said, Well you can mow my yard. And he said, I ve got a neighbor where you can mow his yard. And he said, There s another man over there that he ll let you mow his yard. So he helped me get these yards, we didn t get very much for mowing. Twenty-five cents an hour is what we were making. And so I did that for about two weeks. And he was in the store one day, and I said, Mr. Tankersley, I m going to have to get me a job doing something. I want to go to college, and I don t have the money, and twenty-five cents an hour I can t pay the tuition. He said, I ll give you a job, we need somebody at the TVA at Spring City. And he hired me at fifty cents an hour. PIEHLER: What year was that you were hired? NIPPER: That was in And he said, It s a food-processing laboratory, in Spring City, and it s on two big barges on the lake. And he said, There are two rooms and a bath, and you can live on that. And he said, We ve got a little truck there, and you can drive into Spring City to take your meals. And so, I went down there, I d be down there Monday morning, and I 11

13 could hitchhike down there quicker than I could ride the bus down there. And then on Friday afternoon, I d go out, and I d hitchhike home. And this one fella stopped a couple of times and picked me up, and he said, Do you go home every Friday evening? I said, Yes. He said Well you just wait out here at five o clock, and says, I come through every Friday, said, I ll haul you into Knoxville. So he did. So I made enough money that summer to pay my tuition to school, and it wasn t very much then. I don t know, it was, oh well, it seemed like a lot, but I wasn t making very much, so, but the comparison, I guess, was similar to what it is now. PIEHLER: And so you entered which school NIPPER: At UT in the fall. PIEHLER: September of NIPPER: Uh huh. PIEHLER: I want to ask you quite a bit about UT in 1942, but a few more questions about growing up. And one question is how often did you make it to the movies, and where did you go? NIPPER: We went to the Strand Theatre, and they had these western movies. You paid a dime, and the next year, I mean the next week, that same movie would continue. And I had a cousin that always liked to have somebody to go to the movies with me, and I didn t have the money to spend every week. He said, I sell peanuts and popcorn at the football games, and said, I ve got the money to take you. So we d hitchhike to town, and he d pay my way into the movies. But now occasionally my mother and dad would take us to see Shirley Temple, and we looked forward to that. The Tennessee Theatre s where there was the Tennessee, the Riviera Theatre, and there was a Strand, and a Roxy, and that was the red light theatre. You didn t go there. (Laughter) You didn t dare go there. It was on Union Avenue in Knoxville. So... but we got to go occasionally. And we d go to the school plays and things like that. We everybody was in the same boat. Everybody was poor, and nobody knew any different, see? But there was some people that had an automobile. We didn t have an automobile. We had to walk. And everywhere that we went, we had to walk, or people, our neighbors would pick us up and take us to church. PIEHLER: How would your father get to work, at ALCOA? NIPPER: He rode with a man that worked over there, and he paid him so much a week to ride with him. And he paid him every week. My dad worked from two o clock in the afternoon til ten at night. And the reason he did that is because the pay was a little higher when they worked that shift, either the night shift or that shift, he was able to earn a little bit more money. But that walking got pretty old, and I had a friend that had a bicycle. And he wanted to sell it, and he wanted ten dollars for it. And I didn t have ten dollars, but I mowed yards, and I could pay him a dollar a week. And I told him, I said, I d like the bicycle, but if you ll sell it to me for a dollar down and a dollar a week til I get it paid for, I ll take it. So, he did that. And so, man, I could just, I could load that lawnmower it was one of those old reel 12

14 type push mowers. I could load that on my bicycle. And my old dog and I, we d just go out in the community, and we d just mow yards right and left, and you didn t have to. Before, I d have, see, not many people had a lawnmower. And we had a lawnmower, and we would use our lawnmower to mow other people s yard. And you d use that old swinging cycle to cut the high grass down, cause they would pay you. The first time you mowed the yard, you didn t get paid, until the next time they wanted you to mow the yard. So they would pay you for the time that you d already mowed, after they called you to mow it again. But our agreement would be every week. But they d wait two weeks to sometimes three weeks, and they d still pay us the same, so, but anyway. It was interesting, I think back on it, it was those were pretty good times. PIEHLER: Growing up, before going to college, had you traveled very much? NIPPER: I had been out of the state of Tennessee one time. PIEHLER: And where did you go? NIPPER: It was just across the Georgia line below Chattanooga. We had a, I had an aunt that lived in Chattanooga, and she had a son that was, of course, my first cousin. And we went down there one time, and they took us I expected to see the, see the soil a little different on the other side of that line, but it wasn t. (Laugher) But I had not been out of the state of Tennessee except that one time, until I went in service. PIEHLER: And how far west, even in this state, had you been? Had you been to Nashville growing up or... NIPPER: No. I ve since been to Nashville and Memphis and PIEHLER: But growing up? NIPPER: No. PIEHLER: No. NIPPER: Chattanooga was as far as I d ever gone. And we d go around the loop at the mountains, the old road that went around. That was the highlight of a weekend, you know, when PIEHLER: So you would go up to the park NIPPER: Yes. PIEHLER: Well even before NIPPER: But we always rode with somebody else, see, we didn t have a car, and the neighbors would invite us to go with them. 13

15 MORRIS: Did you ever see Lookout Mountain, in Chattanooga? NIPPER: Yes. We wanted to ride that cable car up the mountain, but it cost too much. We went with someone else there. We didn t have our own vehicle to go down there. MORRIS: Was it always neighbors or friends sometimes friends? NIPPER: Neighbors or friends. MORRIS: It d be the whole family of the neighbors, or NIPPER: Well, sometimes it would be the whole family, and sometimes it d be just they would invite my brother and me to go with them. In fact, I had a neighbor that liked to fish, and he d invite me to go fishing with him. MORRIS: When you were of course you talked about when you entered UT. Do you remember where you were when you heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked? NIPPER: Yeah, it was on a Sunday afternoon. I don t remember the exact date. But I was listening to the radio. And through the static that radio we had had a lot of static, and it s difficult sometimes to hear what was being said. But President Roosevelt came on the air and said that we had been attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, and that we was declaring a state of war. I remember it quite well. MORRIS: Did you know anything about the war going on in Europe before Pearl Harbor had been attacked? Did you keep up with that much? NIPPER: You mean World War I? MORRIS: Well, when in 1939 when the Germans invaded and all that? NIPPER: I remember reading about when Hitler invaded Poland, and some of the struggles that those people were having. That that but I had no recollection of anything in the Pacific. And I d hear some stories about World War I, and I had a neighbor who fought in World War I. But nothing outstanding that I can recall. MORRIS: What was your reaction when you heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked? What did you do you remember how you reacted to that? NIPPER: I remember my mother and dad saying, Well those boys are gonna have to go to war. I remember their saying that, but I listened to the radio regularly to see what was going on and about the devastation. Then you d see pictures in the newspaper. But see there was no television or anything to show. It was all by radio. MORRIS: Did you listen to the radio a lot? 14

16 NIPPER: Oh yes. MORRIS: Do you remember about when you got a radio? NIPPER: I remember, I was in about the, I guess about the seventh grade. We bought a Philco radio, and back then you bought it and brought it home and paid fifty cents a week on it, or whatever, you know, whatever the terms were. MORRIS: Were there any particular programs that you liked? NIPPER: I always listened to Lum & Abner, and there was another one, Amos n Andy, and there were a lot of programs, quiz programs that you would listen where they d give prizes. They d ask questions, and the people would answer. And they d say, Give them five silver dollars, for answering the question correctly and so on. It was like some of these TV shows, but it was all by sound rather than sight. MORRIS: Did the whole family kind of gather around together? NIPPER: Yeah, oh yeah, when Lum & Abner and Amos n Andy, everybody gathered around. And it was just you didn t do anything during that, see it only lasted about fifteen minutes I think. And there was another one that we used to, another program we used to listen to called Inner Sanctum. And they opened a screaking door at the opening of it. We listened to that. And there were some others that I don t recall right off the MORRIS: The Shadow? Did you ever listen to The Shadow or NIPPER: I may have, but I don t recall it. MORRIS: How bout the along the line [of] the movies you talked about Shirley Temple, and do any of the movies, in particular, stand out that you saw, when you saw the different movies? Do you remember any that you just really, really were fond of NIPPER: Well all those western movies with Tom Mix and all those others. They were all the very same thing, the good guy was after the mean guy. And I liked all of them. But I wouldn t go every week now. I d go maybe once a month or sometimes it d be two weeks in a row. It just depended on but I liked The Three Stooges too. (Laughter) I think I saw them on television not too long ago, somewhere, re-runs. PIEHLER: But you used to go see them in the theatre? NIPPER: I bet they re hilarious, aren t they? MORRIS: Did you have a favorite stooge, three stooge, a lot of people say they like Curly? NIPPER: I just liked all of them. (Laughs) 15

17 PIEHLER: What about any war movies growing up? Do you remember any stick out? NIPPER: Yeah. Now I watched, is it Casablanca, wasn t that a PIEHLER: Yes. NIPPER: Wasn t that a. But, now, that was after the war, I believe, or it may have been PIEHLER: It was during the war. NIPPER: during the war. I remember seeing that. See, I would go to the movies. After I went in service PIEHLER: Did you go to the movies in war? NIPPER: I made $75 dollars a month. (Laughter) And I could go once in a while. PIEHLER: So going into the military was a big increase in pay? NIPPER: A big increase, more money than I had ever thought about. Even as a. I started out I was a private. [Of] course I had to take all the exams and everything to get into the Air Force. And I thought. Well, I had to go to I passed the mental test. Then I had to go to have a physical test, and it was here in town. I was in school over at UT. And the doctor gave me all those exams, and I never had, I never had had a physical before. I d been to the doctor, you know, for a little treatments and so on, but I d never had a physical. And he gave me this physical, and he said, Everything looks good. I don t believe I took your blood pressure. And he took my blood pressure. He says, You ll never get in the Air Force with blood pressure like this. He said, I don t know whether to send you to the hospital, to send you home or what. But he said, Your blood pressure is way abnormal. He said, Are you excited? I said, Yes, I am. I m scared to death. And I explained to him that s the first physical I d ever had. And he said, I tell you what you do. You go home, and don t you eat a meal in the morning, or at noon, and come back up here that next afternoon. And says, Don t let this thing bother you. [He] said, You re excited. That ll escalate your blood pressure. So, he took my blood pressure, and it was normal, and so, they accepted me. PIEHLER: Otherwise, you might not have gotten in the service at all. NIPPER: Right. MORRIS: What made you start what made you start thinking about the service in the first place? NIPPER: Okay, I was in my, the last let s see, they had quarters back then. These are semesters now, aren t they? PIEHLER: Yeah, they re quarters. 16

18 NIPPER: Okay. PIEHLER: You were in your third quarter. NIPPER: I was in my third quarter, I believe. PIEHLER: Or at least second quarter. You enlisted in February of So NIPPER: Yeah. Okay. Anyway I was almost finished the second quarter, I guess it was. And I knew I was eighteen in September, and I knew I was going to be drafted. And I said, The best thing for me to do is to join what branch of service I d like to be in. So, I took the Air Force exam, and they said, It will be at least six months before you ll be called up. [They] said, You ll be able to finish that quarter and possibly, the entire year. And so three weeks after (laughter) I put my signature on that dotted line, I was in Miami, Florida, as a private making $50.00 a month. PIEHLER: Well going, before going into the military, I did say I wanted to ask you something about UT. What was UT like in September of 1942? NIPPER: They gave you had to take an entrance examination, and they put everybody it was held down in the gymnasium. Now it s not the same gym now, I don t think. And we had to take military science. That was a requirement for all people, all men. And ROTC is what they called it. And we had to do marching and all this. It was a required subject. We had to take that examination before we could enter university, to see if you were qualified. And I must have been qualified. (Laughs) Some of those questions I d never heard of before, but anyway I got in. And I was making pretty good grades, seemed like some of it was the same thing I d had in high school in algebra and English and some of those things. The English professor that I had END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE PIEHLER: So you had Professor Hodges for your freshman English NIPPER: Yeah. He was a good teacher. I don t think he taught many classes, but I think he just taught this one, but I liked him. And he just made you want to learn. And I had good teachers. I had one algebra teacher, and, [of] course, I was eighteen years old. And she was pretty as could be. (Laughter) And I thought, Boy I sure am glad I selected this class. (Laugher) And she was pretty and had a beautiful figure, and sometimes they d make little catty remarks. But, she was a good teacher. I mean it was a plus, the fact that she was pretty to look at, you know, made you want to learn. (Laughter) And I took, I was in engineering, and one of my courses was in surveying. I had mechanical drawing and surveying, and there was one other course in engineering that we had to take the freshman year. But anyway, we had to survey the whole hill. They had locations, and you had three people in your survey party. And I had my grammar school sweetheart as one of the members. Both of em and the other one I went to high school with, and two girls and one boy. The two nicest, the only two 17

19 engineering students in university at that time, and I had both of them in my survey party. And I said, If you all will do all the paperwork, I ll carry that transit around, and I ll plumb it and set it up, and we ll make an A in this course. And we did. Every one of us made an A. I made a hundred on the final exam that time, and the professor said that s the only time anybody [had] ever made a hundred on the surveying course. But I liked it, it was interesting. But I learned the most I think with a professor, and I don t recall Brown, Professor Brown. And he taught engineering problems, and we used a slide rule. And he had a collection of slide rules that was burned up, I mean he, just hundreds of slide rules. But I learned more about engineering problems under him. I mean he just, he just intrigued you to where you d had to find an answer to whatever the problem was. And all of my teachers were that way, they were. In chemistry, I wasn t too hip on chemistry. But you had a lecture, and it lasted an hour, I guess. And then you went to the laboratory and did all the experimental work in the laboratory. And it was late. And I don t know, do they go to school here on Saturday? PIEHLER: No, not anymore. NIPPER: We went to school Saturday til noon. Our last class would be til noon. And my last lab would be six o clock. I mean the end of it would be six it lasted two hours. But I enjoyed it, but chemistry wasn t my easiest learned subject. MORRIS: What did you expect to do? Did you have some goals at the time? As far as NIPPER: I thought I wanted to be an engineer. And after I came out of service, I worked for DuPont for thirteen years. I managed an office. It was a sales organization. And I wanted to it was a lot of detail work, and it was a good company to work for. I learned a lot. I learned how to operate a business working for [them]. They could count the hairs on a buffalo and tell you how many were missing. (Laughter) It was that they taught you how to operate a business and know where you were making a profit or where you were losing money. And I worked for thirteen years, and I told em, I said, I m tired of this detail work sending in reports every day of the, it had to go out regardless of what happened. It had to go to Wilmington, Delaware to the main office. And so [I said], I want to be in sales. And they said, Well, we ll give you a few customers to call on, but you still got to do this other job. Well, I couldn t do both and do justice to both. I had to come in on Saturday we just worked five days a week. I had to come in on Saturday. I d take work home. Then I d come in on Sunday afternoon and work all afternoon. And I was in New Orleans, Louisiana, and I said, There s got to be a better way. Well this was after the war, now. And so I left, I said, I wanna be in sales. And I saw right then that they weren t gonna replace me that they d have difficulty getting somebody to fill my job. The man that hired me took my job, that s how desperate they were for people at that job. (Laughter) And that was thirteen years later, and so I resigned, they tried to get me to stay, but I said, No, I ve made up my mind, I m gonna be in sales. I think I can sell. And I took a job as a salesman. PIEHLER: Where did you go into sales? NIPPER: I went with an old established company. Here they called it Chandler & Company of the building materials place. And they sold factory-built cabinets. And I thought that that 18

20 would be something nobody wanted to fool with that, but it was a big ticket item. And I made a higher commission on that. And then, they sold that company. So, I went with another company, and I thought, You know, if I can make money for another company, and make good money on sales commissions, why not just open my own business? So that s what I did. PIEHLER: When did you go into your own business? NIPPER: MORRIS: And that was Kitchen Planning? NIPPER: Uh, huh. MORRIS: And you were there for twenty years. NIPPER: Mm hmm. My wife came to work for me one day a week to do some of the bookwork and stayed there nineteen years. PIEHLER: How big did the company become? Was it just NIPPER: I made real good in it. We were a family PIEHLER: A family company. NIPPER: Uh, huh. My wife and I was my wife was the secretary and treasurer, and I was the president. And then I had two of my sons working for me. And we did real well, I was able to give em a bonus every year and pay em enough to where they could live to get the bonus. (Laugher) But I enjoyed it. I d meet people every day of the I ve done sales on residences for a $100,000. I mean, I went the high echelon, exclusive route. And it, I met the nicest people. I mean professional people, doctors and attorneys and people like that, and I got along fine with em. I d bend over backwards to see that they were happy with what we did. I didn t do the mechanical work. PIEHLER: Yeah. NIPPER: We did the design, and we ordered em factories, and they shipped em. Most of em were, most of our products were shipped from Pennsylvania. Quaker Maid and Coppes Nappanee in Nappanee, Indiana, and Wood-Mode those were some of our distributors. I mean some of our suppliers. MORRIS: How did you meet I have never heard this story. How did you meet Bonnie? How did you all first meet? NIPPER: This is gonna surprise you. My aunt married a man who was a principal of a high school, and they were having an eighth grade play. And we didn t go to his school, but they were having an eighth grade play at their school. And I saw this little girl trip across the stage, 19

21 and this is at the eighth grade. I thought, Boy, that s the cutest little girl I believe I ever saw in my life. (Laugher) And I was in the eighth grade myself, and I thought, Boy, if she could just be my sweetheart. And I thought about her for the longest time after that. And then [I] went to high school. Well, she entered the same high school that I did, and I didn t have any way to take a girl out. Nobody had a car, (laughs) and it was one of those things that it s hard to date somebody and not take em to the movies, or out to eat. That s generally what you did, go to the movies and eat, and that s it. And I still liked her, and I was too timid and backward to ask her for a date. Well, my aunt s husband said, If you want to go out on a date, I ll loan you my car. And he did. The very last day of my senior year, I ask her for a date, and she accepted. (Laugher) So we dated from then on PIEHLER: Even when you were in service you stayed in touch? NIPPER: Well we stayed in touch, uh huh. After I came out of service, it was two years before we got married. PIEHLER: But you at least laid eyes on her since eighth grade? NIPPER: Yeah, oh yeah. And I ve thought about that so many times, you know, and little did you know it would ve come to pass. PIEHLER: Actually, I just wanna (Tape Pause) PIEHLER: Do you remember where you were when Pearl Harbor occurred? You mentioned hearing Roosevelt s address, but what about the actual bombing? The actual attack itself, do you remember? It was a Sunday. NIPPER: I remember the announcement on the radio. PIEHLER: You do. NIPPER: and I remember it was on a Sunday afternoon. PIEHLER: Yeah. NIPPER: We were sitting in the living room, I mean at home, and it came on the radio. PIEHLER: Now you had graduated from high school in NIPPER: No I was in [the] Class of 42. PIEHLER: Okay and then you worked for that summer NIPPER: That summer of

22 PIEHLER: So you got NIPPER: til September. PIEHLER: So you got a good paying job. That was a real break, that TVA job. NIPPER: Uh huh. PIEHLER: How did the war change things in your high school? NIPPER: There were a lot of changes. Number one, the seniors when the war broke out, a lot of em didn t complete their senior year and joined the service. PIEHLER: Right away. NIPPER: Right away. Uh huh. I ve got, I don t know how many of my friends joined the service. And we had one fella that he was a comic (laughs), but he said, I decided to be a patriotic American and go join the navy. And he said, I think that if I go out there, if they send me out there to San Diego, and I don t like it, he said, I ll just come back home. He said, They wouldn t let me come back home. (Laugher) The only reason I signed up is that I knew I was going to be drafted. PIEHLER: Yeah. NIPPER: And I wanted to get in the branch of the service that I felt like I would enjoy. PIEHLER: And so the air force was that the pretty obvious... NIPPER: Yeah. Nothing else entered my mind. That was what I wanted to do. MORRIS: Did it go back to, you talked about that developing interest in airplanes and everything NIPPER: I don t know MORRIS: did it go back to that? NIPPER: I ve always been interested in stories about flight, about Orville and Wilbur Wright and, you know, the different ones, the history of flight and so on. And I just thought, Well that d be a good branch of the service to be in. And we went through a lot of rigorous training, and we went to a lot of school. We had to do a lot of memory work. I mean it wasn t just going out there and learning to fly an airplane. There was a lot more to it than that. MORRIS: What did your you said your parents, when you heard about, when the announcement was made about Pearl Harbor, they said, Well those boys are gonna go to 21

23 NIPPER: She said: Well I, I hope the boys don t have to go, but I ll bet they will. MORRIS: Did she mean you all, or did she NIPPER: Yeah, my brother and me. MORRIS: And you indicated on there two I noticed that somebody else in the family was in the service, was that your brother? NIPPER: Yeah, my brother. MORRIS: How did he end up in the service and what branch? NIPPER: He was in the navy. He was gonna try to join the naval air force, and his eyesight wouldn t permit him to pass the test. MORRIS: Did he also join because he thought he would get drafted? Or do you know why he NIPPER: He joined before I did. I m sure of that. He knew he was going to be called too because, see, he was sixteen months older than I was. And I went in shortly after he did. MORRIS: When did you start thinking that, do you remember when you started thinking that you would be drafted? Apparently, was it when you heard in high school that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, or was it after that? NIPPER: Well I knew I wouldn t be drafted until I was eighteen because they wouldn t take you. Navy may have taken them at seventeen, I don t know, with parent permission, but the air force wouldn t take you until you were eighteen, see? So, I thought about it my eighteenth birthday, that s when I began to think that I m going to have to go because they ll draft me if I don t. MORRIS: But around Pearl Harbor, you didn t look that far down the pike, I guess, and think, Well when I turn 18, that, I m going... Cause you didn t know. NIPPER: No. I, no it didn t really. It didn t really cross my mind. It uh MORRIS: When you said you began your training the first place was Miami. What did you do in Miami? NIPPER: We stayed in the hotels they had the floors covered, the real nice floors covered with pine flooring. And it was right on the beach, I could throw a rock and hit the ocean. I never had been out of the state of Tennessee, except down there in Georgia (laughs) until that time. And it was rigorous training, they ran you through [of] course I had been doing a lot of calisthenics over at UT, and we had to take physical education, exercises here. And I could 22

24 skin that rope they had a big rope about that big around, (demonstrates) and I could hand walk that thing to the top of that gymnasium. I was the only one that I ever saw go all the way to the top of that thing. And it was a challenge to me. Why, if they want you to do it, you re supposed to be able to do it. And I could do that, I could skin that like a monkey. And I was in good physical condition, but we had a lot of people see there weren t just prospective pilots in the group down there. It was to get you physically in good condition. And there were office people that had never done any calisthenics of any kind. And they put em out there, and a sergeant would stand over you, and you were going to do it. If you didn t do the push-up, if you didn t do what they, and. I was sore, I could hardly walk. And these poor people, I think they d just almost pass out. And they would make em go back later and do extra calisthenics until they got that soreness worked out. And we had to run, we had to run, like five miles. We had to go over all these obstacle courses and so on, but I enjoyed it. I didn t have any problem with it at all. PIEHLER: I just wanna back up just a little bit. You mentioned having the physical here in Knoxville. That s where the physical was? NIPPER: Yes. PIEHLER: The induction physical. NIPPER: Uh huh. PIEHLER: Where did you report after Knoxville? Was it directly to Miami, or did you report to Memphis? NIPPER: It was PIEHLER: Or Nashville? NIPPER: I went to Nashville, and I can t remember whether it was before PIEHLER: Because people have told me that is where they segregated whether you were going to pilot s training, navigation NIPPER: I believe I went to Nashville, and they did. We had a series of tests that we had to go through with, and I m trying to think if it was before, I believe I went to... PIEHLER: Miami first? NIPPER: Nashville. PIEHLER: First? NIPPER: And then it was either before or after, but I believe it was after Miami. PIEHLER: Miami. 23